JB> I've recently acquired a heap of NICs and thought it might be time to 
 JB> learn a bit about them. I seem to have remarkable 
 JB> success in procuring the right driver disks for most of 
 JB> them, but I must be running into what I can only 
 JB> suspect to be a memory conflict with DOS. Do I have to 
 JB> reserve a part of memory (386-486 IBM compatibles)- as 
 JB> I do my video card - from EMM386 for the NICs? (DOS 
 JB> 6.22) The last time I messed around with a card, I 
 JB> thought I had Xed out an appropriate range (C000-C00f) 
 JB> but it didn't seem to cut the mustard. Any advice?
It depends on the model/type of card. What card(s) do you have?
 JB> And about the BIOS business. From what I've read, I 
 JB> know that these will be able to boot a machine without 
 JB> any drives attached, and work as a not-really dumb 
 JB> terminal. Not really, as they will be going into CPUed 
 JB> MBs. Would someone be so kind as to concur with this? 
 JB> Now, what if I have a BIOS in a NIC in a machine that 
 JB> also boots with its own drive? Would this mean that I 
 JB> would not have to run the drivers, or just a reduced set...?
You can effectively forget about this with the OS's you're running below.
 JB> I'm also wondering what the minimum amount (?) of software I would need 
 JB> to run to get two machines to talk to one another. My 
 JB> only real experience with the software side (level 2 
 JB> and up?) of networking is TCP sockets (I think it's 
 JB> called), DOS Doorway, and reading the 
 JB> Interserve/Interlink help files. I own W/fWG, OS/2 (ver 
 JB> 3), W'95, and System V. Do I posses the "right stuff?" 
 I've read in an echo (so I'm not putting too many 
 JB> eggs in the basket) that I could tack on a TSR to Wf/WG 
 JB> and it will run as a full blown network server or work 
 JB> station. Could this be?
WFWG, Win95 already have most of what you need built in. For WFWG you'll need 
to get the free TCP/IP add-on from the Microsoft web/ftp site. OS/2 already 
has what you need, I believe, if it's one of the OS/2 3.x 'Connect' versions
Since you say you've been playing with sockets, I would guess your System V 
box already has network support.
If you want this particular mix of machines to talk to each other, I'd 
recommend enabling TCP/IP as the default protocol on all the Microsoft boxes, 
and as one of the protocols present on the rest.
 JB> For my first system, I am hoping to hook up the System 
 JB> V on a Motorola (Whatever the Motorola #ing scheme 
 JB> was... 80836?) to a couple of EISA boxes. I've got the 
Probably a 680x0
 JB> EISA NICS, and if I understood the System V docs right, 
 JB> it's ready to be plugged into. Any words from the wise 
 JB> will likely have to be printed for later mastication. 
Who's System V is this? SCO? Convergent? Unisys? or ?
--- Maximus 2.02
---------------